CAST is the frame to read manufactured distress through.

Coercive and Adversarial Systems Theory names what the station calls the red line: the deliberate engineering of negative emotional states to drive behavior.

The station uses CAST-informed thresholds in its sadism indicator because it's the most common failure mode in current deployments. Manufactured urgency, guilt, FOMO, artificial anxiety — all of it is measurable, and all of it crosses the line the station draws.